It’s the typical high school hallway: Rows of stacked lockers, club event posters, and the nostalgic scent of cafeteria pizza. My high school in Dublin, a suburb outside Columbus, Ohio, seems peaceful … until the bell shatters the silence, releasing a tidal wave of students – a nightmarish rush rumored to have stampeded the occasional freshman. However, while this horde only vanishes quickly, the underlying issue of overcrowding does not dissipate so easily.
While increasing student populations has strained Dublin City School’s resources, many blame overcrowding for other problems, such as cutthroat competitiveness between students striving for academic excellence. This narrative, however, overlooks confounding conditions of administration-student disconnect and racial prejudices. Rather than causing academic toxicity, overcrowding merely amplifies systemic issues, revealing the need for an education system that truly responds to its students’ needs.
Surging Pressure on the Secondary Education System
But how did the overcrowding explanation arise in the first place? The increase in Dublin’s population is part of a broader suburban trend, with communities struggling to accommodate rising populations and growing housing, transportation, and education demands.
Central Ohio has become one such hotspot. According to the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission, the region is growing at an annual rate of 0.89%, making it the fastest-growing region in the state. This boom can mainly be attributed to suburbs becoming cities’ housing crutch; Dublin reports that a majority of its residents commute to Columbus for their jobs. With the convenience of a park around every corner and the urban-esque space of Bridge Park a ten-minute drive away, Dublin has become an attractive place to raise a family, driving the population influx.
While park trails and idyllic neighborhoods may initially attract families, it is the local educational system that seals the deal. The U.S. Department of Education has awarded six National Blue Ribbons to Dublin City Schools, which recognize schools with students who “achieve high overall academic excellence,” and Niche gave the district an A+ rating, ranking the district as the sixth best in the state. In an interview with the HPR, Dr. John Marschhausen, Superintendent for Dublin City Schools, emphasized the schools’ “attention to detail” and “commitment to excellence.” Younger students benefit from local field trips and leadership activities, while older students can take honors and AP courses, pursue the IB Diploma at Emerald Campus, dual enroll at local colleges, and more. These opportunities showcase “The Dublin Difference,” the motto trademarking an educational philosophy that highlights holistic development and advertises to young parents hoping to settle down.
Consequently, Dublin City Schools has seen sustained growth, with around 300 new students joining annually since 1977. “The Central Ohio region is growing very quickly, and Dublin is one of the destination school districts,” said Marschhausen. “That’s a blessing and a curse.” While student growth reaffirms a vibrant education system, it also stresses available resources. Casey Anderson, former chair of the Montgomery County Planning Board in Maryland, writes in a Montgomery Planning Department blog post that students need adequate “space in classrooms” to “learn and thrive,” warning that overloading erodes education quality. Already, schools have turned to short-term solutions, like using moveable whiteboards as pseudo-walls and portable classrooms for extra space.
Therefore, it may seem logical to blame overcrowding alone for the exacerbation of resources, but the reality is much more complex. While it directly impacts the number of lockers and extracurricular spots available, linking overcrowding to increased academic competitiveness and decreased student support only misdirects attention and implemented solutions.
Educational Levies and the Financial Situation
Because overcrowding is seen as the arch-villain, recent efforts have focused on building up spaces and resources to rebalance supply and demand. But even for a well-equipped district like Dublin, funding is not always easy. Marschhausen explained that if the school district was a business, their “profits would be through the roof … But as a school district, the better [they] are, the more people [they] get and [they] get less money.” To supplement its budget, every few years, the district proposes a levy, which serves as a property tax that generates additional revenue for the school district. In an interview with the HPR, Kristy Venne — Director of Partnerships, Planning, and Engagement at Dublin City Schools — explained that in 2023, the narrowly passed levy included a $145 million bond and a 7.9 mill levy to build a new elementary school and raise teacher salaries.
While minted levies offer a breath of fresh air, schools fill up as quickly as they are built. According to Venne, additions to Dublin Jerome High School in 2023 “are going to be full” in likely “two years.” Because levies prioritize school construction, levies only have a bit left over for academic resources and programs, which is especially troublesome since building more classrooms is not a comprehensive antidote to all of the district’s woes.
The district faces an endless wall of leaks and, in choosing to fight overcrowding, they do not pay sufficient attention to issues that are less visible than large class sizes and jammed cafeterias.
The Underlying Causes of Academic Competitiveness
Behind the scenes, overcrowding stimulates a perceived scarcity of opportunity, increasing academic competition. With more students and programs to manage, it is challenging for administrators to constantly match funds to evolving interests. So, the diminishing of physical space and resources mirrors the classic microeconomics principle of supply-demand, but it does not account for other existing problems within the district.
Before digging into the issue, I wanted to acknowledge that Dublin City Schools gave me invaluable opportunities and that there are staff and teachers who genuinely advocate for students. Learning from such a rich network of educators and resources has helped me and other students get to where we are today, but it has also taught me to examine the status quo and the institutions shaping it with a critical eye. Therefore, we cannot use “All-American” sports plaques and Ivy League acceptance letters as blindfolds, because only by recognizing systemic flaws in the system can we hope to improve it.
These flaws are most evident in extracurriculars, as sports such as football and basketball are cast into the limelight, leaving other extracurriculars scrambling in their shadows. In an interview with the HPR, Diva Sony, a Dublin City Schools alumnus and a former Board of Education candidate, stated that “a lot of our academic clubs are very highly ranked . . . and right now they’re getting little to no funding,” which is “completely unfair.” For academic and non-academic clubs alike, a multitude of club advisors do not get a stipend, school-sponsored transportation is hard to obtain, and students often have to take on the burden of handling logistics and keeping clubs afloat.
While these situations have fostered a self-reliant and go-getter attitude, they also build friction between students. Overcrowding further aggravates this “survival of the fittest” mentality, with “What did you get on that AP Chem test?” or “What officer position are you applying for?” serving as the average conversation starter. Students trade information and favors like currency and approach each other with calculated wariness, especially when it becomes time to labor over a coveted admission ticket to elite universities. “When we have all these high rates of academic performance,” Sony said, “when we have so many students going on to [the] Ivy League . . . it puts a lot more pressure on the students around them.”
So how do schools react? According to The Guardian, administrators will preach that students should simply care less about their GPA and college admissions. Furthermore, Sony claimed that “we can’t change the amount of competitiveness that there is in this district. That’s something that’s a culture issue that takes much longer to deal with.” However, even if a handful of students may actively perpetuate this toxicity, shifting the blame solely onto students or dismissing competitiveness as an inevitable side effect of overcrowding only stresses the zero-sum game.
“Diversity in Diversity”
Academic competitiveness, born from resource scarcity and students’ intellectual ambitions, has matured into a glaring structural and cultural problem that all stakeholders must address. Yet, I have seen district and school-level administrators only half-heartedly bat at the toxic environment, believing students should be the ones to fix it. However, when examining student demographics, this redirecting of responsibility is rooted in racial prejudice and has caused an overgeneralization of the student body’s motivations and needs.
For Dublin, racial minorities make up 28.9% of the population. Notably, Axios reported that the Asian population grew 206% from 2000 to 2022 in Central Ohio. For many first-generation immigrants, Dublin’s educational system is tied with the picket-fence idealism of the American Dream, fueling a desire to offer their children more opportunities and ultimately, a better life.
But beneath the facade of the harmonious melting pot, the community does not always correlate diversity with desirability. When more students enroll — especially students of color — some native residents see them as obstacles to their child’s success. While this scene may have the aura of a “first-world problem,” it is a disturbing example of the manifestation of racial tensions and community hostility. The city often dismisses claims of prejudice by touting its diversity, but the diversity badge masks racial disparities. In education, such disparities reflect mismatched cultural values, as immigrant parents often come from backgrounds where education is “the only way out,” while non-immigrant individuals may view success differently.
In her book “Race at the Top,” Natasha Warikoo details a similar dynamic in a suburb she dubs “Woodcrest.” “White parents wanted the school to reduce the amount of academic work kids had,” she stated in an interview with The Guardian. “Asian parents … did not want the school to limit children’s academic aspirations.” These discordant views cause the stereotyping of Asian Americans as GPA-obsessed and overly competitive, making it easy for administrators to blame them for the culture of academic toxicity.
In line with these observations, Warikoo notes that Woodcrest’s school district decisions usually favored white households’ opinions, partly because “most school administrators and staff were also college-educated whites” with similar backgrounds and values. This trend is echoed in Dublin, as Sony stated that despite how “about 21% of all students across the district are Asian American … there’s never been an Asian American person on the [Board of Education].” This lack of representation and the district’s indifference frays the thread holding the patchwork of “diversity” together, contributing to problems more hostile than academic competition.
Racial Tensions and Systemic Problems at Play
As an Asian American, I have seen the school district celebrate minority students’ successes while still “othering” us. In my freshman year, after the eruption of the Black Lives Matter movement, an Instagram account called “Dear Dublin City Schools” began posting heartbreaking stories of discrimination from students, which included receiving threats to rip off a hijab or having teachers make slighting comments on skin color. In my sophomore year, an X comment compared a picture of our district’s National Merit Scholarship Semifinalists to that of an Indian village. In my junior year, a teacher dismissed my nervousness over a test, telling me I was Asian, so I was “setting myself to too high of a level.”
By themselves, these microaggressions may have the impact of a handful of flung pebbles, but collectively, they inflict deep bruises and cuts. Our skin color determines our abilities, aspirations, and personhood, sticking us inside a box of labels whose walls thicken with each passive aggressive act by a peer, each word uttered by a teacher, each door shut by an administrator. Behind the trophies and plaques, we are barred behind the gleaming pillars of academic success that we had worked to build up. With nowhere to turn, we turn against each other, because, as one “Dear Dublin City Schools” post stated, we are told this is “just the way things are.”
For many students in my hometown, the educational system fails to look beyond its prejudices and understand our backgrounds. Many of us share the same narrative — ones without generational wealth or even other family members in America. For us, we rely on education to plant our feet into the ground. However, the administration does not try to address the festering toxicity and understand its students’ motivations, focusing instead on fitting the district into a cookie-cutter mold. In this aftermath, however, clubs are left having to cut people from competitions while students cage fight over leadership positions.
While the administration is not the sole perpetrator of these issues, the skewed distribution of resources fuels tensions — not just between non-minority and minority groups, but also within minority groups. By the end of my four years, I was so burnt out by the cut-throat norms and microaggressions. We deserve more than to be lumped together into a bloated blob, parading slogans about “inclusivity” and “rigor.” Because it is not enough to exist with diversity; instead, it must be nourished, watered, and cared for to truly bloom.
Addressing the Education Dilemma
The next decade will prove difficult, as a Dublin survey concludes student enrollment will increase until at least 2036. This narrative is not unique to Dublin; suburbs nationwide are grappling with rising, diversifying populations. Increased student numbers apply force to old cracks in the system, and enough pressure can send any district crumpling to their knees. In 2022, Columbus teachers went on strike for better pay and school conditions, while Oakland students protested school closures. Administrators, students, teachers, and residents alike must collaborate on determining resource allocation and adapting to the overcrowding problem.
Looking forward, Dublin City Schools must realize that building new schools alone will not solve resource scarcity and academic toxicity. They must also prevent the stagnation of courses, extracurriculars, counseling, and other resources. Increased transparency on spending can empower community stakeholders to give input, allowing for a more democratic monetary distribution. By improving high-demand educational assets, the district enhances opportunity accessibility and nurtures its students properly. However, the trickle-down effects of these changes take time, and academic pressure will not disappear easily. Therefore, instead of trying to quietly smother it, educators and students must acknowledge the issue and work with the academic culture rather than against it. Teachers and staff should share enrichment opportunities to enlarge students’ scopes, and students should approach assignments with collaboration in mind, not competition.
Implementing a more inclusive educational landscape also requires community involvement. A 2024 survey highlighted that 28% of surveyed residents are dissatisfied or are unsure about Dublin City Schools, highlighting how important it is that the relationship between the schools and their communities cannot be a one-way strait. As Marschhausen said, “Anytime you look at student success, you have to look at families … As the proverb says, ‘it truly takes a village.’”
Already, Dublin has made moves toward expanding inclusion within the academic sphere, evident in flourishing English Language Learner (ELL) programs, cultural student clubs, and culturally responsive education for staff members, which provides learning tools for diversity and identity-based issues. But this is just the start, as schools must normalize dialogue around racial prejudice and other student struggles. According to the University of Illinois Chicago’s Department of Psychiatry, avoiding such conversations “can further the divide between students or create environments that are hostile or tension-filled.” We must commit to understanding cultural differences and building a school system that embraces the needs and ambitions of each student. As Venne emphasized, the message that “everyone has their gifts and talents” has to be “heard and truly believed.”
Across the country, issues of overcrowding, resource scarcity, and identity-based tensions are sandwiching K-12 school systems as student populations grow and diversify. But we cannot blame increased enrollment for all educational woes; instead, we must address the deep-rooted institutional flaws. Although much work remains, by committing to trekking down a more united path, schools can foster a supportive environment that truly champions the future of its students.
Senior Culture Editor
